Rome as portrayed by Miles Hyman is like a woman, an elusive woman of mystery, seen on a street corner, in the shadows of a terrace or on a balcony.

Look away for an instant and she’s gone. Just like Rome. The city responds to his approach, offering up its beauty. It becomes “energetic and dynamic, charged with a fleeting beauty, joyous — the elements of the poetry in its everyday life”.

The city’s inhabitants take precedence over its monuments. “Today,” Miles Hyman says, “I realise that the Rome Travel Book could have been called Travel Book of the Romans. I absolutely wanted to capture the daily life of the inhabitants of this enchanting city with honesty and admiration — I am tempted to say “tenderness”. Why did I want to stress the human element of the city? Because, for me, the key to the city is the striking contrast between its ephemeral life and the eternal.

Miles Hyman is an illustrator of periodicals and adapts novels — most of them detective stories. He also writes graphic novels. His drawings give the impression that he could have been a writer, with a style somewhere in between that of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Conrad, or even a film director. It can be seen in the line, in the depth of the colours.